Along the upper reaches of the city, is where I find her. A platform that functions as a kind of dock juts off the high wall toward the eastern part of the city, a long road held perfectly level by massive chain lengths that secure it more fast to the wall that any other part of the city. A road stretches down the platform: to the right, a neighborhood of warehouses with men walking in and out, loading or offloading supplies, and to the left, a row of half a hundred circular additions that stretch off the main road and out into thin air.

  An arrival is coming in as I find the dock platform, it looks like a cabin made of steel, a house and lawn all perched on a pentagonal wedge of iron that buzzes the air like a heat mirage. A man down on the dock platform waves in the flying house, directing it toward the side of the platform where it lands alone, the entire dock buzzing for a moment as it touches down and begins to still. The circles range in size, the one the house lands on easily able to accommodate three such cottages.

  I take the road, hugging my new coat tight though I don’t really feel the chill high up here. There simply was no way that I could travel out into the city without purchasing myself a new wardrobe, or any wardrobe for that matter. The black blouse with the nice buttons managed to survive the tower somehow, and I happen to think my new gray long coat trimmed with brown and white fur goes quite well with it. I pass by men walking down the road, most hard at work, and I nod to them when they feel so inclined to acknowledge me, copying their hidden language. Sometimes we nod up, sometimes we nod down, no rhyme or reason to it that I can tell.

  Jess is there already waiting for me when I arrive at dock 42, a solitary figure sitting on stone steps, looking down at the platform with the world passing her by. She hugs her own coat to herself, the slight tremble in her shoulders giving away that she isn’t quite so accustomed to the cold. I think for a moment that the woman has grown some modesty, but when I step around her to see her face, I find her usual undress still apparent in the open front of her coat.

  “You came,” she says, puffs of mist coming out of her mouth.

  “I’m the one that invited you,” I say. “It would be rude not to come.”

  “I had begun to wonder.” Jess rubs her hands together before working her way to her feet. “I have been here for an hour at least.”

  I look up at the sky, squinting toward the sun. “I said midday.”

  “And it is an hour past that,” Jess says.

  “I’ve had an ear open, but this city seems to lack any time bells.” I shrug.

  She shakes her head at me and starts gliding down the stairs. “Get a timepiece. From the looks of your fancy new clothes, you can afford it.”

  “I’m not made of money,” I say, joining her in descending the stairs.

  “Says the woman wearing a crown,” she quips.

  I touch a finger to the golden circlet on my head. Sometimes I forget that it is even there. “You really think my clothes look fancy?”

  “Fancier than you speak,” she says. She must see something on my face because she reaches out and rubs my arm. “You look nice.” She tries to smile, but there is a strain there, and I know why.

  “I’m sorry about…”

  “Thanks,” she says quickly, cutting me off. “I appreciate it, but I don’t want to talk about it now.” She jumps down the last step, making it to the dock and rubbing her shoulders again. “Let’s get a move on.” Jess nudges a heavy case with her foot, all dark leather, two more twins sitting out on the dock next to it.

  The platform of the dock itself stretches out in front of us, smaller vessels parked around. Red seems to be a prevailing color: squares, hexagons, and rectangular slabs of metal painted red with chairs, small rooms, and once even a garden and fountain built upon them.

  From what I have been able to tell about these contraptions, they all mostly seem to be based upon putting something on a flying platform. The platforms themselves are supposed to be the true masterpiece of enchantment, all the other fluff piled on top just there to aid the driver or provide comfort. One look at even a rudimentary schematic of their working left me more confused than I would be if I had never learned a thing about enchantment–far too advanced for me, yet.

  “So, which one is it?” she asks.

  I pull out the wedge of stone from my inventory, turning it over and over in my hand. “Well, I picked this out of all the shiny things in the Guildmaster’s vault, so I only have that to go off of.” I make a quick survey of all the craft parked on the dock. “If I was a betting woman,” I say, nodding to a particularly extravagant specimen sitting alone.

  “Are you? Jess asks as he begin to walk, her carrying two of the cases while I manage with one.

  “Only when I know that I will win.”

  The lines crossing over the stone key in my hand begin to glow with light as we approach a large hemisphere made of pearlescent gold that sparkles in the sunlight. The base of the dome must be twenty feet across, and I don’t immediately see any hint of a way to enter.

  “Galea,” I say in my head. The fey spirit spins into reality just in front of me the green lines on the stone key changing to a steady lavender. The entirety of the golden dome seems to shake a moment, spinning around on some hidden axis and stopping. A door appears out of the metal, a black rectangle that looks to lead into the void.

  “You have flown one of these before?” Jess asks, sticking her hand into the inky darkness and pulling it back out again.

  “Nope.” I jump in, and for the first time I get to admire the prize the Willian Guild saw fit to grace me with for all my turmoil and suffering in their failed trial. It is oddly disturbing as I step into the craft as the gold dome cannot be seen from the inside. Instead, I turn around, finding Jess still standing outside of the craft, staring at the darkness where I just entered with a bit of trepidation on her face.

  Gold tiles, shining with a slight rainbow finish create the floor of the enclosure. My eye is immediately drawn to the center of the craft that is dominated by a throne made of gold, decorated in gilded sculptures of skulls, thorns, and flowers. To the left of the throne, near where the tiles stop and I imagine the wall to be, several racks are arranged horizontally, places to store cargo. Next to the racks stands a well-stocked liquor cabinet, fine crystal arranged atop it, enough to fashion a decently sized party for a picnic date. At the back of the craft, plush furniture, all the same tasteful brown leather, stand atop a crimson rug that looks to be tasseled with gold around a heavy oaken table currently dominated with a stone gameboard. If I drug a mattress in here, this room might be fit enough to be a home.

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  “Get in here.” I dip out of the door, grab ahold of Jess’ wrist and pull her inside. I leave her to gawk about as I had no doubt done just a moment ago while I grab her bags and haul them over to the racks to store. She is still gawking by the time I get back.

  “This is what they gave you for the trial?” she asks. “All I got was some gold.”

  “Wrong,” I say. I squat, pulling a heavy wooden box from my inventory, making certain that it comes into being already resting on the ground, no reason to scuff the new floors of my new ship. I think they are called ships. That’s what the information my eye tells me about the key calls them anyway. “You got this too.”

  “You got me something?” If the woman had eyebrows, they would be going high.

  “I went on a little bit of a shopping spree when we got back to somewhere that I could. I remembered you saying that you could make a forge, and then I saw a merchant selling this.” It isn’t so hard to wedge a nail in the join between the lid and the side of the box and pry the lid off, the board squealing in complaint as I open it up. “You wouldn’t believe the price on this feathersteel…”

  My words die as I look into the box. Where just a day and a half before had been pristine and shining ingots of metal so light that it was impossible to believe, now rested bars that had all the luster sapped out of them, a few cracked in places.

  “Feathersteel?” Jess peeks into the box, needing to cut off a bark of laughter as her eye passes over the fifty or so ingots sitting dully inside. “You do understand that feathersteel needs to be stored in a cold place until it is properly worked.”

  “I bought so many.” I pick up one of the ingots, straining with the weight. How did it get so heavy all of a sudden? “Fifty ingots of the finest metal.”

  She laughs again, stepping around the crate and wrapping arms around me. “It will be alright; I know how to salvage at least some of this.”

  “I can’t believe I wasted money. Money.”

  “Poor girl.” Jess pets the back of my head, her shoulder shaking with a giggle. “Thank you for that, really. The laugh and the metal both. I think I needed that.” She steps back, snickering as she looks into the crate again. “I’ll be sure to make you the pieces that you are no doubt hoping to get out of this gift, free of charge, of course.”

  “You really think that I might have an ulterior motive?” I start backpedaling toward the throne in the center of the ship. Ever since I first saw the thing, I felt a need to touch it.

  “I have found you humans to be tricky,” she says.

  “Can’t deny that.” My butt slides onto the chair and I find it oddly comfortable despite the hard metal of its composition. Galea still floats in front of me, but the moment that my left hand comes down on the skull set into the armrest of the chair, a dozen windows flash into being just in front of me.

  “I have integrated with the ship,” Galea informs me.

  “Like the storage ring?”

  “No, mistress. That device was so simple in its design that I was capable of overriding the control spirit and was able to increase its efficiency. The design of this vessel is far more sophisticated and was built to allow for piloting by fey spirits or more fleshy beings.”

  “So, you can fly the ship,” I say.

  “We can fly the ship,” she says back. “Though yes, it will mostly be me, but you provide the will, Mistress. A more dull and mundane component, but a vital part.”

  I look past the back-handed nature of her comment. That is just the kind of spirit she is. I flex my will, and with no effort the black rectangle standing out in space shrinks and disappears.

  “I thought you said that you have never flown one of these before,” Jess says over my shoulder, looking at the space the door just disappeared from.

  “How hard can it be?” I scan the windows standing out in space in front of me, and another effort of will instructs the ship to move. If I hadn’t been watching, it would have been impossible to notice the craft lifting up from the dock and floating out into space. From where I sit, I don’t feel the movement at all.

  “Do you have that map that Arabella provided?” I ask Galea. Another window opens in front of me, a map of the entire trial ground, a particular mountain picked out and shaded with green. “Good. Are you capable of navigating us to that location?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do it.”

  The wall of Grim starts to shoot away from us as if the whole world were moving around our little room. Without a conscious effort, I find myself turned, the throne facing back toward the shrinking city as it grows distant. This ship is fast, faster than anything I could have expected.

  “For a first timer, you are doing quite well,” Jess calls from somewhere behind me. “I’m going to take a nap in one of these chairs. I haven’t managed much sleep these last few days.”

  “Sleep as long as you want,” I call back to her. “I’ll let you know when we are close.”

  “Good. This mountain has a lot of things to kill on it? You promised me that.”

  “Yes. Plenty of things to kill on it. I am not leaving until we have both reached rank two.” I can’t leave before that, can’t even think about it.

  I am facing forward once again, watching as the land changes to a forest that begins to speed past beneath the ship. I simply watch the land for a time, eventually hearing the soft breathing of Jess as she sleeps behind me.

  My hand clenches the skull on the throne, that awful temptation sparking up inside me again. Why do I keep torturing myself like this?

  Looking forward is so hard, but I manage for a time, thinking about what I need to do, thinking about where I need to get to. Those moments of black, that time stolen out of my memory, what I wouldn’t give to see that absent part of my life, what I wouldn’t give to never see it. The temptation grows too strong, it always does, and my eyes turn right, looking right at that window that has haunted me for the last week, the very first thing I saw when waking up in Arabella’s mansion.

  You have killed Samielle Kraesh

  You have killed Coriander Mel’Draven

  THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!

  I read it three times, letting out a long and ragged exhale. Why am I so weak? I couldn’t even bring myself to ask Jor’Mari how it happened, how pathetic. He deserved so much more than that.

  A moment of blackness, like waking up from a dream, and I see that hand there, charred and burned on the stone, a single finger broken and pointing to the side. One moment of darkness and I have killed my friend. If Jor’Mari hadn’t taken that knot from the vault I know I would have. It feels like I live in a different world, a world where someone else did such a horrible thing. Never again.

  My knuckle pops as my hand tightens on the stone. I can never again let myself be like that, made a puppet by someone else, standing too weak to resist. Never again. I will burn a mountain down if it will give me the strength to stop that from ever happening again. I will burn whatever I need to to stop it.

  I look once more to the window, knocking my head back against the gilded throne. “Galea.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  “You can get rid of the window.” I can’t keep it there all my life. For a week I have tried with all my will to not look at it, and then when I notice how pitifully I avoid it, forcing myself to read the names. I don’t understand what I am doing with it, pricking my heart over and over, but I know that no good can come of it.

  “You told me before not to do so,” Galea says.

  “Keep a record of the names,” I say. “I don’t want to ever forget. Never let me forget.”

  “As you wish.” The window in my vision vanishes, and it feels as if a weight has been lifted off my chest; I can breathe just a bit easier. “Would you like me to keep room on the record for more names in the future.”

  The future. I pull the soul cage from my inventory and look down at the bundle of crystal. If everything goes right, this will live inside me in just a few short weeks. That is only the beginning of the path, I know. I have started down a road so long, that stretches so far before me into the future, that I cannot possibly guess at its end.

  “Exeter, I hope there will be no more.” With a turn of my wrist, the ball of crystal disappears once more. “Best to keep space open though.”

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